Ours is a busy world. Our modern lifestyle is highly efficient, yet completely desensitized and impersonalized. We flit around from place to place hurriedly, and often lose comprehension of our surroundings. Our cell phones, Facebook accounts, e-mails, iPods and even our interstate highways are all very useful and enjoyable, but there is a darker side to such instruments.

I find myself texting people instead of calling them, or having a long telephone conversation when it would be just as easy to meet for coffee. Reliance upon such substitutions strips us of our ability to communicate effectively with other people once we actually meet them, which is a highly important skill to have in a world of billions of people.

Interstate highways make traveling from one locale to another so easy. You hit the road, cruise at 75 miles an hour  and before you know it, you’re there. Ordinary highways, on the other hand, take you through towns you’ve never heard of.

Those slower-going highways are so much more preferable. You get to actually see the country you’re traveling through. If you travel them often enough, you can see the crops grow. You can see the leaves grow and crops sown, and six months later you can see the leaves turn gorgeous colors and the crops harvested. The earth around us is like a phoenix, and if you watch closely, you can see its life, death and rebirth.

Efficiency as an aspect of economics is to be prized. But when it begins to alter our quality of life and our understanding of the world and people around us, we should take time out of our journeys to enjoy the scenic routes. There is so much more character in them. And character, after all, is what makes us human.

In February 2008, my freshman year, my computer broke. At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had been spending all my time on Facebook, waiting for e-mails or touring the blogosphere. First thing in the morning I’d go to my desk, log onto the interwebs and stare at a screen displaying ones and zeros in a colorful and hypnotic pattern. And then, for a month, faced with the decision to go without the Internet or trek down Helser Hall’s eerie hallways to the computer lab, I adapted to what I suppose life is supposed to be like.

Waking up with the sun is one of the most regenerative things you could do in a morning. And when you don’t devote half your time to digital interactions, you have so much more time to be productive, catch up on school or work, meet up with old friends, make new ones, and generally have a good time by forming legitimate connections with actual people.

Text messages are another horrible way of communicating. I wish you luck condensing an entire thought, with your expression and voice inflection, into 160 characters. I can’t do it. And when I try having a real conversation over those bite-sized communiques, my meaning is often lost on people.

What troubles me is not the impersonal nature of these methods of communication. What troubles me is that we use the tools designed for expediency even when expediency is not required. Where deliberate action should be the case, we blaze through interactions as quickly as we can without regard to the connotations we create.

Due care is not taken to actually get our point across as we mean it. To do that — to say what we mean and have our words taken as we mean them — we have to actually go out, meet our audience and experience a little interpersonal communication. Things matter to people.

It’s a lot harder to break up with a significant other in person, when you have to see the pain in their face, than over a text message they may or may not receive, and to which they may or may not respond. Understanding our peers requires actual interaction, and actual interaction requires us to understand our peers.

Because of that interaction, we are better, more comprehensive, more intuitive people.